Jarrett Walker's personal notes on places, arts, plants, and the search for home.

2009.09.01

on art nouveau

Except that I think it's the first period of design that's fundamentally kind. Compared to it, every older style seems to be so clearly about power -- the power of one dead man over others.

This isn't to say that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals or the painters of Baroque gold leaf weren't kind people, but still, those styles, indeed, all the styles I can think of before about 1890, were clearly meant to convey power, to put you in your place. They were about the power of God, or of the state, or in most cases both kinds of power in symbiosis.

Why does Art Nouveau seem so unsuited to the eternal agenda of power? Is it because, for the first time, a style of design seemed to reflect the raw beauty of the organic, of life itself?

Until then, the only beauty that design had noticed -- apart from landscape as captured in painting -- was that of the human body. Art Nouveau took its inspiration from the calmer beauty of plants, a beauty that's really unsuited to power agendas of any kind. The artist, of course, is appearing as a power center for the first time in these years. Art Nouveau could serve the cult of the artist, of course, but it doesn't transfer well to any larger power, whether of state or church.

Even Impressionism in painting -- barely a decade older than Art Nouveau -- is always very much about how nature strikes human eyes. It's about the psychology of human perception. And while there's no avoiding that topic when discussing any art, Art Nouveau seemed aware of an organic essence of all things, and that this essence would would go on without us, and that it could be beautiful.

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Riga in Latvia offers the most pointed commentary on this. The older part of town has the largest collection of Art Nouveau buildings in Europe, and walking past these beautiful buildings is an absolute tonic for the soul after being near some of the horrendous Soviet construction in that city.